Behind The Scenes: The Quiet Pools

April 4, 1990, Lansing, Michigan

The Locus containing the first review of The Quiet Pools
arrived in today's mail. Bookstore-haunting friends and fans
across the country are reporting initial sightings of the Genuine
Article, the first Kube-McDowell hardcover. And -- finally! --
there's a new contract coming, a new novel to write. I've been
living with this one for a long time, but it looks like it's time
to move on.

Time to reshelve these reference books, which have been
living on the worried old work-in-progress bookcase for the last
two years. There goes Nancy Tiley's Discovering DNA, Helen
Fisher's The Sex Contract, Corning's The Synergism
Hypothesis, Robert Powers' The Coattails of God. There
goes Francis Crick's Life Itself -- hmmm, I really should
have made a photocopy of the appendix on the DNA/RNA code,
instead of marking up page 173 that way.

Time to pack up the unwieldy stacks of notes, file cards,
partial drafts, maps, newspapers, magazine articles, photographs.
There go the clippings about the Amazon, the Time article about
the Human Genome Project. There goes the pamphlet about the
Bonneville Dam, in the Columbia Gorge. There goes the paper plate
bearing Dr. Jordin Kare's sketches of the laser-cannon launch
complex.

And oh, sweet memory, look at this ancient artifact, hiding
at the bottom of the pile -- the file containing the ten-year-old
novelette which started it all, and the rejection slip from
George Scithers which prompted me to put it away. "A good
idea, but awkwardly handled," George advised me, before
going on to dissect the manuscript in some detail. "The
Quiet Pools" would not be my second Asimov's sale.

Awkward, indeed. "Amateurish" would not have been
too strong. At that time, I had written only a dozen stories, and
sold but five of them (though I would eventually sell four more
from that group, and fold a fifth, "Mothball," into
Empery). So perhaps I can be forgiven for not realizing "The
Quiet Pools" wanted to be a novel.

The novelette was ten thousand words of explaining in search
of a story. The power of its one evocative moment depended almost
entirely on a vision I could see, but -- as I realized after
George bounced the story -- hadn't written. Reading "The
Quiet Pools" was a lot like catching only the last two
minutes of a movie -- with the person you sat next to whispering
like crazy, trying to tell you everything you missed.

I never submitted "The Quiet Pools" anywhere else.
I had a very clear sense that I didn't yet have the tools to tell
the story the way it needed to be told. And I didn't want to
trash the vision with my own ineptitude. I filed the manuscript,
my cut-and-pasted typewritten drafts (I said it was ancient), and
my notes, made an appointment with the future, and moved on to
other things.

The future took eight years to arrive -- eight years during
which I left teaching for full-time freelancing, wrote and sold
six novels, became a father, left Indiana and returned to
Michigan, suffered through a divorce. By the end of 1987, I had
completed work on Alternities, and my editor, Beth Fleisher,
wanted to know what I was going to write for the book Berkley/Ace
had tacked onto the Alternities contract.

Because it was the "novel to be named later," there
was never an outline, or even a formal proposal, for The Quiet
Pools. But I knew with some clarity what I wanted to write.
At the heart of "The Quiet Pools" was this question: is
it really inevitable, as so much SF assumes, that humanity will
colonize the stars -- and, if it is, why? And the most
interesting time to ask that question is when the deed becomes at
least marginally possible, which I projected to be late in the
next century.

In January, 1988, I promised Beth (in a letter) "the
story of the struggle between those who are fighting to end the
starship project and those who are struggling to complete it --
of a few men and women caught between a dimly understood destiny
and a dimly apprehended horror -- and of the interface between
the conscious and the unconscious, the free will of the mind and
the determinism of the body."

And all of that turned out to be true. But it doesn't go far
enough. Because it doesn't address the question "Who does it
hurt?" -- the answer to which, in my opinion, is what turns
an idea into a story, and breathes life into the moments you hope
to share with your readers.

When I can clearly see the people who are caught in the
pincers, when I've found a place where I can stand to be silent
witness to the turns, travails and small triumphs of their lives,
then -- and only then -- am I ready to start writing. Because a
novel is not about its theme. It's about life as the writer sees
it, and ordinary people as the writer understands them. The
writer shouldn't sit down at the keyboard to confess, or to
invent, but to give witness. And a novel ought not be an essay,
or a tract, but a story. Not my story. Their story.

(Enough schizoid writers' workshop pontificating. For now.)

I already had the missing piece in hand, and it didn't take
me too long to realize it. Months before, I had become aware that
parents in general, and fathers in particular, had gotten short
shrift in my novels. I took that as a clue that I might be
ducking looking at something difficult, and promised myself that
I would tackle a story about fathers and sons as soon as an
appropriate idea presented itself.

One night, somewhere in my neural net, that promise ran
head-on into the kernel of "The Quiet Pools," and the
two fused into one. I suddenly knew who was hurting, and why. So
I said good-bye to my friends, retreated to my basement office,
and set to it.

For me, the actual writing process is one of a sort of dynamic
synthesis. Even when I'm not working on a book, I write down bits
of overheard conversations, record idle thoughts and
observations, take photographs of intriguing faces, write
"sense essays" about interesting places I visit, clip
and file news items in thirty or so broad categories. When I
begin writing, I cannibalize those resources, pulling them
together and finding connections between them. They come together
in and around the conflicts of the story in unexpected, often
serendipitous ways.

It's this process of synthesis which helps put flesh on the
naked skeleton. For instance, I happened to see extended-marriage
advocate Stan Dale on the Sally Jessie Raphael show, later found
that a friend had attended one of his workshops, and came away
from listening to both with a new understanding of how the family
had changed by the time of the novel. I went to the Pacific
Northwest for Orycon and Norwescon, stayed to explore the woods
and waterfalls, and came away knowing where Christopher
McCutcheon had grown up, and how it still touched him. And so
forth.

I suppose some zealous researcher could take this box I'm
packing up and have a field day correlating it with the pages of
the novel. ("Ah-hah! So this was the inspiration for page
106.") But doing so would probably miss the point.

When I begin work on a novel, I have to know where it ends --
the moment, the feeling, sometimes the exact words. The first
decision I face is where to begin telling the story. Two points
define a line, but a story is not a straight line. Past Chapter
One, I'm embarked on a journey of discovery, learning as I write
how the beginning and the ending are connected. It does not seem
to me that I'm "making it up" -- rather, that I'm
sorting out what must have happened, like working out one of
those letter-substitution puzzles where you have to turn SPURT
into CHOKE in five moves.

The Quiet Pools was a vastly more complex puzzle,
since it contains five distinct but interrelated threads of
conflict. It wrote almost painfully slowly, and took me six
months more than I had thought it would to finish -- the first
time I've seriously missed a deadline. And when I finally turned
it in, in April, 1989, I was so emotionally drained that months
passed before I was productive again.

But the result is a novel I'm greatly pleased with and proud
of. The narrow sfnal theme broadened in the writing to become a
question everyone confronts -- who are we, and why do we do what
we do? At the same time, the abstract speculations drawn from
Fisher and Crick faded to a supporting role behind an intimate
portrait of two troubled families. In short, I wrote the book I
wanted to write, told the story I wanted to tell.

Just don't expect me to be able to tell you in two sentences
What It All Means. The question I dread most as a writer is,
"So, your new book -- what's it about?" I hate it when
editors ask. I hate it when other writers ask. I hate it when
friends, family, and readers ask.

Because, ultimately, The Quiet Pools isn't about the
plot, or the characters, or the setting, or the theme, or the
deconstructed analysis of its literary entrails. It's about a
place I found to stand, and something I saw from there, and the
feelings and thoughts that experience evoked in me. The Quiet
Pools, in its totality, is nothing more or less than my
carefully worded invitation to come and stand where I stood, and
experience it for yourself.